Knockoff goods plague IPO-bound Alibaba

HONG KONG - At first glance, the Monster Tron T1 headphones sold on Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's Taobao site are a tempting offer for audiophiles looking for state-of-the-art equipment.

HONG KONG - At first glance, the Monster Tron T1 headphones sold on Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's Taobao site are a tempting offer for audiophiles looking for state-of-the-art equipment.

But sellers omit one key detail: Monster Inc. never produced this model.

"There should be none in existence but our prototypes," said Dave Tognotti, general manager of the California company best known for its audio-visual cables. He said Monster went so far as to announce a launch date, but the design proved too complex to build to the company's quality specifications, so it was abandoned.

"You can understand our surprise when we started to see counterfeit versions of this product appearing on websites like Alibaba.com, Aliexpress. com, 1688.com, and Taobao. com," he said. All four sites are part of Alibaba Group.

Tognotti said that 99.5 percent of purported Monster products sold on Alibaba sites are fakes, based on thousands of listings that the company's investigators have examined over the years.

Phony headphones and other knockoffs are a persistent problem for Alibaba that has grown more urgent since the company started working on a blockbuster initial public offering of shares in the United States. Analysts say the IPO could raise $15 billion.

Founder and Chairman Jack Ma has called theft of intellectual property a "cancer" on society, and Alibaba has stepped up efforts to root out fakes that dent its credibility with consumers, but there are still complaints.

"To ask for $15 billion to move Alibaba forward is going to open the floodgates on counterfeits," said Craig Crosby, publisher of the Counterfeit Report, a website that flags pirated products sold online.

Alibaba spends $16 million a year on anti-counterfeiting efforts. Taobao has 200 employees working on copyright infringement, brand protection and quality control. The company says on its blog that it took down 114 million listings of fake or counterfeit products in the first 10 months of 2013, nearly a third more than in all of 2012.

For such efforts, the U.S. trade representative removed Taobao in December 2012 from its "notorious markets" list of counterfeit goods.

Many people hope that a U.S. stock listing will give Alibaba the resources and motivation to step up enforcement.

Nick Wester, founder of the Mainland Group, which sniffs out knockoff products on behalf of brand owners, said: "As Alibaba moves into the same playing field as Amazon and eBay, they'll have to be responsible."